Personal Statement Essay Prompts

While some of these prompts may seem more limiting than others, in truth, they are all fairly open to your interpretation. That said, don’t push it! Keep the broad topic in mind and don’t stray too far from it. Also, remember the purpose of your essay: you need to demonstrate some crucial aspects of your personality, maturity, and intellect while telling an interesting story about yourself.

Here are the Common App prompts for 2017-18 and some ideas for how to start thinking about them:

1. Some
students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful
they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds
like you, then please share your story.

Is there something you mentioned on your application that is central to your
identity, on which you would like to elaborate? Is there something that you
want to tell admissions officers that did not fit anywhere else on your
application? Here is your chance!

Is your identity strongly shaped by your family
structure, a hobby, a sport, an illness, or a transition? What is the story and
how did it affect you? Tell admissions officers about it in a way that shows
your best self. How does it make you someone college admissions officers want
on their campus?

2. The
lessons we take from obstacles we
encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when
you faced a challenge, setback,
or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the
experience?

This prompt can be tricky, but don’t pass over it
too quickly. We all experience obstacles, even if they don’t cause outright
failure. But if you choose this prompt, you need to put a positive spin on it.
Notice the reference to what you “learned from the experience.” Make sure that
you explain how this experience made you a stronger, more thoughtful,
compassionate, or insightful person. Tell admissions officers that you learn
from your past mistakes and failures and you’re a better person because of
them.

Notice that this prompt has three parts to it. You
need to tell the story of:

when you
experienced a challenge, setback, or failure

how it affected
you

what you learned
from it.

3. Reflect
on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the
outcome?

This prompt can be a great one for students who
fight for human rights or who have made change in their schools through student
government, but an excellent answer to this prompt can be on a smaller scale as
well. Perhaps you stood up for someone who was being bullied. Or maybe you
spoke up in class even though your views were different than those of your
peers.

Finally, consider times you challenged your own
beliefs or ideas; this could be an opportunity to show admissions officers that
you have the ability to reflect on your own beliefs and change them as you grow
and evolve.

Notice, like the second prompt, this prompt has
three parts. You need to:

tell the story of
when you challenged a belief or idea

explain what
prompted you to speak up, act, or change your mind

explain what
happened after your questioned/challenged the belief or idea.

4. Describe
a problem you've solved or a problem you'd like to solve. It can be an intellectual
challenge, a research query, an ethical dilemma - anything that is of personal
importance, no matter the scale. Explain its significance to you and what steps
you took or could be taken to identify a solution.

As noted in the prompt, this essay can have a
variety of answers. Perhaps you want to write about the fact that your school
was not recycling plastic bottles. Perhaps you want to write about your
experience being excluded from a clique at school. Or maybe you want to write
about something somewhat larger like finding homes for the homeless animals in
your community. You just need to be able to cite a problem that is meaningful
to you, explain why it is meaningful, and then offer a potential solution or
describe what you did to remedy the problem.

Do try to keep it fairly realistic. You probably
want to stay away from extremely complicated solutions to large scale issues
like war and famine, for example.

The crux of the essay is the last sentence of this
prompt: Why is this problem significant to you? Does it affect you personally
or is it something you care about because you’re concerned with the well-being
of others? Or is it some other reason? Once you have explained why this problem
is important to you, explain what you have already done to solve the problem
and/or what you will do in the future. While solving problems is not always
simple or straightforward, your essay should be written in a straightforward,
clear, and coherent manner.

5. Discuss
an accomplishment or event, or realization that sparked a period of personal
growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.

You may want to avoid writing about an obvious,
common event for this essay. Many admissions officers have read countless
essays about getting one’s driver’s license or having one’s Bat Mitzvah. Unless
you’re fairly common event has a unique twist, try to write about something
more unusual.

For this prompt, you don’t have to write about something
that marked some enormous transition in your life (though you can, of course).
You can write about small things, too; it just has to be something that made
you pause, reflect, and grow.

Finally, if answering this prompt, remember to
show Admissions Officers that you do, in fact, have the ability to reflect and
grow. This shows that you are self-aware, responsible, and a great addition to
a college community. But also don’t shy away from acknowledging that you, like
everyone else in the world, have more growing to do.

6. Describe
a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track
of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to
learn more?

Here’s a prompt that cuts to the heart of the
matter: what are you obsessed with? Your answer to this prompt will show
admissions officers what you are truly passionate about, why you find things
engaging, and what you do when you want to learn something.

Pro tip: don’t write about your video game
addiction or your obsession with a celebrity or TV show unless you can connect
this pastime with something clearly productive, philosophical, or
career-related. You don’t want to suggest that you will fail all of your
college classes because you’ll be locked in your dorm room playing Call of Duty. However, if your obsession
with games like this stems from your interest in how stereotypes are spread and
reinforced, narrative strategies, or the communities that form around
multi-player games, then you’ll be telling the admissions office something
insightful about yourself and your interests.

7. Share
an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you've already written, one
that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.

This prompt makes it
easy for you to reuse something you’ve written for another type of application,
but that doesn’t mean this is the easiest prompt to choose. Sometimes writing
without limits is more challenging that writing a response to something
specific.

If you do choose this
prompt, make sure your resulting essay still achieves the purpose of the
personal statement: it needs to convey something meaningful and specific about
who you are. Don’t let yourself stray off topic; this is why organizing your
message around a story or event is useful.

If these musings here aren’t enough to get you started, you may want to reach out for help. Our writing experts have lots of tools and tricks to get you thinking and writing, and the sooner you start brainstorming, the better!

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About the Author

A former commodities trader on Wall Street, she enjoys teaching Math for the SAT and the GRE, because doing so calls on her quantitative abilities, honed during her undergraduate pre-medical years at Harvard.

Congratulations! You’ve completed your MCAT and taken the required coursework to apply to medical school. Now that you’ve locked in the quantitative aspects of your application (your GPA and MCAT), where do you go from here? Read more